By Death

Book 1: By Death Digging up the dead isn't the best way to lay ghosts to rest … Anthropologist Jade Hansen had been touched by death once before. While in Haiti one year ago, she'd lost her unborn child, and the devastation nearly took her sanity in the time that followed. Getting back to work means facing the grief that's all but destroyed her. Determined to be strong, she returns to Haiti with a mortuary team to recover the bodies of an American family from a mass grave, following a devastating earthquake. Dane Chester is an independent contractor, who willingly puts his life on hold to help rebuild the sleepy town of Jacmel, after the natural disaster all but razed it. He's staying with his sibling while Dane volunteers his services in the group effort, but finds himself put off by his brother's pregnant wife and her relatives. Wanting to do good for those who lost so much from the quake creates a tug of war within him, given the unexpected family strife. Selfishly he wants nothing more than to go home, … until he meets Jade, who, at first sight, makes him realize what's been missing in his own life for so long. Jade's mortuary team begins work, but, from the start, everything that can go wrong does. As anthropologists, they've all faced the very human horrors of situations like this before. But something else is at work at this mass grave site-something malevolent that none of them can explain-yet equally can't shake the communal disquiet. Rather than laying her ghosts to rest where she suffered such loss, Jade finds herself confronting death all over again. This time her grief is mingled with an unnerving dose of terror-and this incredible man Dane, who unexpectedly awakens her heart to love again, is somehow right in the middle of it all.

Book 2: By Death Meg Pearce is haunted by a death that may never be explained, … and so she can never truly be healed. During the summer before she started college, she and her boyfriend went on a camping trip that ended with one of their friends disappearing. In one fell swoop of destruction, she lost not only a friend but her own innocence, her future, her best friend and lover, her everything. Seventeen years later, Meg's career as an anthropologist drives her to seek understanding about why things happen and the answers for human behavior. Those questions that torment her have her returning to the same campsite of the tragedy that defined her life. A part of her hopes to solve the mystery that has plagued her for most of her adult years. Ultimately she longs to find a way to deal with the loss. Instead of gaining closure though, she stumbles onto a gruesome discovery that has her reeling back to the darkest time in her existence. Detective Chad Ingram has spent the last seventeen years attempting to solve a stone-cold mystery-one that also stole his life and his true love. Death seems supernaturally determined to shake up their lives for good or evil-only this time, Meg and Chad are both in the crossfire.

Book 3: By Death After losing two close friends three years ago in a snowboarding accident, Stacy Carter has become a loner and can't seem to make peace with this loss, not when Death intrudes upon her personal life again and takes two more people she loves. Meeting new people and trying to make a normal life for herself proves to be harder than anything else she's done. Meanwhile, in her career, being a forensic pathologist puts her in close contact with the dead. While fascinating and never dull, it isn't exactly a cozy conversation starter. When her brother tries to coax her out for a mountain vacation to help her heal, she has reservations, even as she tells herself rationally that she needs to face this. Reservations and rationale, however, were in short supply the last time she saw Royce O'Connell at that mountain … Royce is floored when Stacy finally returns to the spot where she lost her two best friends, intending to deal with the depression that she's battled for some time. Royce and Stacy have been longtime friends, but Royce wants so much more between them. Yet he's well aware that he blew their last time together. Stacy makes it clear she's not looking for reconciliation. However, he can't help seeing her reappearance in their tight-knit group as a second chance, maybe his only chance. Out in their winter wonderland, the vacation atmosphere shifts from merry to mayhem in a hurry, when they come across a dead man. Then, not long afterward, Stacy's brother goes missing. The nightmare is only just beginning, as the realization settles in that they can't trust anyone. Maybe not even each other …